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Maple blooms. After a star-strewn night, dawn came earlier than it did yesterday. Young sunlight splashed on the flowering maples and new-budded oaks on the hillside out back—that is, until some high clouds moved in from the west. And I heard a towhee's song for the first time. It's a bright, declarative song: two musical chimes and a trill, repeated every several seconds. It'd been a while since I didn't recognize a bird call, so I'd forgotten about the sort of mad binoculars-addled scramble such a thing causes me to perform. I dashed in for fieldglasses, hurried back out, tipped my head in subtle directions (not fully trusting my ears' directional sense), realized I should be on the other side of the building, crept quickly around (staying out of the remnant sunlight), and managed to position myself just about directly beneath the singing bird. Mid-May has remained chilly. Good, soaking rain has come about every other day, helping put fears of summer drought out of the minds of Mainers. The hawk has returned at least once in the past week, screaming from the oak grove, giving the starlings pause. The starlings, meantime, are about to unleash another noisy brood on the earth: the young in the hole near the crook of one tree give forth loudly as each parent shows up with grub, a routine that's been steady and ongoing. Also loud—amazingly so—is the voice of an ovenbird calling from a high thicket. And the white-crowned sparrows have hung around for several days now. I watched for a while this morning as one whitecrown scratched about in a pile of fallen limbs just out the small back window. The ugly red remnants of a squirrel carcass still litter the roadside out front. The event, about twenty-four hours ago, thrilled the resident crows; using their excellent car-dodging skills, they dined on guts all day—and are still at it this morning. I object to roadkill, the very idea of it. Survival of the fittest, I suppose. Birds seen or heard by 7:30 a.m.: towhee, chickadee, starling, crow, herring gull, phoebe, ovenbird, black-throated green warbler. | |||||
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Bird Report is a discursive, intermittent record of what's outside my window in Rockport, Maine, USA (44°08'N latitude, 69°06'W longitude). —Brian Willson | |||||
It sat high in an oak. I caught sight of its ruddy sides, black head, and the light feathers under its tail. "I'll be damned," I said to myself (or something like that). "So that's what a towhee sounds like." Now let's see if I can remember.
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